HackSpace #51

A few years ago, I broke my arm. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a huge injury and I was all healed within a few months. However, while healing, my arm was in a cast from hand to shoulder and I could barely use a computer. That’s a bit of a problem for someone who makes a living working at a computer. I tried out some of the various accessibility options, including speech-to-text, but none of them worked particularly well. At the same time, it was a struggle to get dressed and generally perform daily chores. It was a little reminder that assistive tech is for everyone – just not all the time. You may not need it now, but at some point in your life, you’ll probably…

hsmag.cc/TestTubeLamp This project by Tjiani Lucht is incredibly simple – the excellence lies in the way the idea has been executed. There are almost no fancy electronics to it, other than a step-down converter to reduce the voltage from the 15V coming from an existing power supply to the 3V required by the LEDs, and a switch to turn the lamp on and off. What stands out about this build is the use of materials: instead of light bulbs, the maker has used 24 LED filaments housed in glass test-tubes, with additional brass bits to extend the LEDs further into the tubes. The electronics are housed on a piece of MDF, and the test-tubes are held together by transparent acrylic. It’s incredibly simple, but no less striking for that.…

hsmag.cc/WeatherBot When we spoke to Lewis Aburrow, creator of the DIY Machines YouTube Channel, he was still working on the prototype of his weather forecasting machine. It’s such a great idea that we had to get it into the magazine, so here it is. The WeatherBot uses an ESP32 to take data from OpenWeatherMaps and display it as a constantly updating diorama, showing various weather conditions as an overlapping series of scenes that rotate to show wind, rain, snow, and other weather conditions. We’re sick of looking at computer screens, so it’s a nicely analogue way of getting information, but if you want more detail, Lewis has added an e-ink screen showing temperature, precipitation, and wind speed, so you’re not forced back to the computer if you want more information.…

hsmag.cc/NickelEnclosure As much as we like the bare PCB aesthetic of the Raspberry Pi, it does tend to attract dust, and is a magnet for spilled coffee. Third-party cases for Raspberry Pi have been around almost since the dawn of time (at least, since the Raspberry Pi was launched way back in 2012). However, we’ve seen none so shiny, so simple, nor as robust as this one from AppliedSBC in Plainview, New York. As you can probably guess by looking at it, the two halves of the case are carved out of slabs of aluminium, which are then nickel-plated to keep it shiny. There’s a rubber base to stop it from sliding around, or you can screw it to a piece of wood. There is a black version, but we…

hsmag.cc/FreqAnalyser Audio is a huge, deep, twisty rabbit hole of expensive gear, performance optimisations, and indecipherable jargon. And that’s what makes it fun. If you’re at all into audio, this ten-band frequency analyser provides an easy, graphical way to show you exactly what’s going on when you’re listening to the latest Taylor Swift LP. You can roughly divide this project into the pretty bit, the clever bit, and the very clever bit. For the pretty bits, the maker used addressable RGB LEDs, 10mm thickness transparent acrylic to diffuse the light from the LEDs, and black acrylic to provide a background. The clever bit is the ESP32. The very clever bit is the custom PCB designed by emdee410, which makes everything possible. The exact details are beyond us, but we do…

hsmag.cc/duckyPad The standard keyboard, as it exists on most devices, is a slow, archaic thing. The QWERTY layout wasn’t invented with speed or ease of typing in mind, but to ensure that the most frequently used keys were far apart in order to reduce the risk of jammed typewriter mechanisms. Once that became entrenched, computers were forever hampered. Useful features such as special characters and actions such as copy, paste, zoom, etc., are treated like add-ons, often accessed by contorting the hands to press two or three keys at once, twisting our precious carpal bones until they ache. Into this workflow and anatomical mess comes the duckyPad. You can buy this from its creator, dekuNukem, in a complete form or as a bare-bones assembly to which you add your own…